There are no ironclad laws here, and most great leaders are people of contradictions. For many in my grandparents’ generation, Franklin Roosevelt was an icon of breezy confidence and effortless strength. They knew him as a smiling face on newsreels, as a confiding voice issuing from their radios for a fireside chat. But beneath the self-assured image was what the historian Garry Wills called “a consummate actor.” Just to appear to walk in public, Roosevelt, with his polio-stricken legs, would have to shift his weight from a cane on one side to the son who held him up on the other side.
